My first RubyGem: wanikani

I've been studying Japanese for quite some time now. The Japanese language, as you might expect, is pretty deep. Besides all the gairaigo (borrowed words from English and other languages), just about everything is different, from the grammar to the writing. As such, there are a ton of websites I go to just about every day to study different aspects of the language.

One of my current favorites is WaniKani, a web app that helps learning Japanese Kanji and vocabulary using spaced repetition. I've been using WaniKani for a handful of months, but it has already helped me in different aspects of the language, especially when I was in Japan on vacation a few months ago.

Recently, they released an API for accessing their content. I got a few ideas on some small projects to do, particularly with a spare Raspberry Pi I have (more on that some other time). Since I'm a Ruby developer, I thought this would be a perfect time to finally create my first publicly accessible RubyGem.

With that came the birth of the wanikani gem. It's a small gem to make it easy to call WaniKani's API functions in any Ruby project. I have a few private RubyGems in some of my work projects, but those have never seen the light of day as a public repo, so I wanted to share the love somehow. It also serves as a learning experience. Hopefully someone finds the project useful and helps out with pull requests or critiques so I can continue learning. I'll definitely try to do more and share some more open-source to help others as many people have helped me with their projects.